Since it was the first time that the Techcrunch Hackathon took place in
Europe, our team decided that we just had to support this event by offering
our own contest! Besides Zalando, other great companies did a sponsorship such
as Foursquare, Xing, Yammer, Paymill. Due to these partnerships, the hackathon
was completely free for all the 500 international participants. The venue
"Arena Berlin", a huge indoor hall near the river Spree, was just perfect to
host all hackers and create an open, bustling and productive atmosphere.

We brought our brand new API with us and as you can imagine, we were very
eager to find out the coders reactions and how many teams would choose our API
for their hack. With this interface they had access to all of our over 150.000
products in the catalog. This offered endless possibilities to create a cool
piece of software.

After a short lightning presentation of all available APIs, the Hackathon kicked off at
Saturday noon. The hackers made about 100 teams with 2 to 5 members. From then
on, the clock ticked and the 24-hour-hack began.

The mission we gave to the hackers at the very beginning was to "create an innovative and creative
approach to take our customers to a unique shopping journey". Fortunately the
API went down really well! We got a lot of positive feedback and many teams
decided to use our API to build something quick and great. And the glimpses we
saw looked really promising. During the night the hackers began to get really
stuck in! The Zalando crew at our booth supported the teams through the whole
night with coding tips, fashion advice and (most important) Club Mate in huge
quantities.

The rising sun over the Arena sounded the bell for the last round. All teams who wanted to
present on stage had to register and submit their hack. It was astonishing for
us to see that over 90 teams were still in the race - almost nobody quit
during the night. The presentation rules were really tough for the teams: They
could choose 2 team members to go up on the big stage and present their idea
with a strict time limit of 1 minute. Eight teams were competing for the
"Zalando Sponsor Prize". As every team did an awesome job, we really had a
hard time fo find an overall winner. In the end, the winner was
"Glovr"!

So what did they do?

The two hackers managed to use a "Leap Motion" device to measure the exact size of a human hand by just
hovering over the device. With this data a search can be done in the Zalando
product catalog for such items like the perfect fitting gloves. The customer
chooses the style and the perfect fit is guaranteed! That simple but powerful
idea really impressed us. And most importantly: it actually solves a real
world problem! A great combination of hardware and software!

And since we like it the spontaneous way we already invited the
team, who used our API for creating “Partylando” to our Tech Headquarters in
Berlin Mollstrasse. After an office tour and a short introduction in how we
work at Zalando Technology we did a short TechTalk session, where Maarten and
Bert presented their Hackathon-results to some of our developers. Thank you
Maarten and Bert for your great efforts! And since this worked so well, we
decided to invite more hack-teams to share their results with our shop-team:
Next week we will welcome the winner team!

All
in all the Disrupt Hackathon 2013 was an impressive event! We really
want to thank all teams for participating and using our API to create these
great results in such a short amount of time. Your positive feedback has
definitely encouraged us to do more hackathons and work even harder to make
our API better and better. Also we want to thank
Leslie and the whole TechCrunch team, they all did
an amazing job during the whole weekend!

See you next time!

P.S.: Here you can
get more information about the event, watch some videos and read interesting
background information.

P.P.S.: As mentioned earlier in the article: The API
was especially created for this event and is not publicly available at this
point of time. Be sure to check our Tech Blog regularly to get all new
information about the API and it’s development.